An amazing creature, The Attenborough: a beloved longtime survivor despite many predators in the field. There he is, in his natural habitat, talking to a TV camera while prone over a fossil on a windy cliff, wading off shore with crustaceans, or in a rainforest as a slithering velvet worm (“this enchanting little creature”) crawls up his arm.
He conveys boyish wonder as he delicately traces a fossil with his fingertip, or calls out to a rhino, “Hello old boy, how are you?”
David Attenborough has traveled the continents, teaching TV viewers about the natural world for decades. Now, at 84, he embraces new technology to travel back in time half a billion years, thanks to lively CGI (computer-generated imagery). His goal is to explore and explain how animals began — “how the first organisms laid the foundation for all modern animals we know today, including you and me.”
Spoilers ahead for anyone who doesn’t believe in evolution. Sir David tells the scientific truth in “First Life,” premiering tonight, 6-8 p.m. on Discovery Channel.
He begins and ends near his childhood home in England where the rocks, he says, are 600 million years old. By the time we follow him from continent to continent and back in time, we’ll have a better idea of what that means.
Humans and their ancestors have been around for 2 million years. The dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago. The fossil he’s showing us, Charnia, is more than eight times older, going back some 560 million years. It’s worth trying to wrap your head around. What’s weirder, a critter with five eyes, a millipede as large as a car or the fact that Attenborough calls collagen “the sticky tape of the animal world”? (He also notes that collagen is what humans use to plump up lips.)
Making us care about microscopic bits, he speaks with passion, white hair blowing over his parka, as he gingerly navigates rocks and explains geology, glaciers, drop stones, the Ice Age, and the origins of single-celled organisms. More than 50 years on the job and he’s still excited.
Attenborough makes the whole of evolution sound like a mystery story. Turns out, in the push to grow beyond a single cell, oxygen was the key.
He visits the Great Barrier Reef to examine a sponge, expressing bondless appreciation for this critter with no digestive or nervous system. Apparently the sponge gives scientists a good indication of how cells first clumped together to form bodies.
Fossils “wonderful and bizarre” reveal a quantum leap in evolution, he notes.
Hard to believe that cliff he’s standing on in Newfoundland used to be the bottom of the ocean. There he finds evidence of the first animal life, not a plant, not quite an animal, but a “proto-animal.”
The series travels down an evolutionary dead end, charting animals with no descendants who dominated the scene for first 20 million years, incapable of evolving. Then, in South Australia, he finds evidence of the moment animals first evolved a body shape 550 million years ago. “They began to move!” Computer graphics illustrate squishy things living on the sea floor. From there it’s onward to a head and a tail.
“It took 3,000 million years to get that far.”
Attenborough refers delicately to the first evidence of sex. Amazing underwater photography captures the moment corals breed. It has something to do with the moon.
In Switzerland, we see how the first mouth, teeth and digestive system evolved (scientists prove it with help from a very fancy microscope). And we’re on to a chapter on trilobites and why we love them.
In a press conference this summer, Attenborough was asked how he feels about deniers of evolutionary science.
“There are whole swaths of the U.S. where people reject the facts of science and simply don’t believe in evolution,” he said. “There’s no debating; one can only present the facts.”
He does that here, with contagious enthusiasm.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
